Wayne County Sheriff's Office asks for $1M more for overtime at jail

Dec. 16, 2013

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Detroit Free Press Staff Writer

Wayne County Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny will decide whether the county’s sheriff’s office should get additional funds to function, or scale back in other areas to stay within its $95-million budget for operations, including its mandated duty — running the county’s jail system.

Testimony Monday in a hearing that will decide whether the office was underfunded by the county commission laid out the situation for the county’s jail system, from jailers sometimes working double a normal workweek’s hours, to inmates being left in cells for prolonged periods because of inadequate staffing.

“The sheriff will be at a crossroads,” Undersheriff Daniel Pfannes said Monday. “Either he’ll be in noncompliance with the 2011 consent decree (for jail staffing) or he’ll violate the (Wayne County) appropriation ordinance. He’s taken a lot of hits for this. And he’s not going to take it anymore.”

The office is to run out of its overtime allotment of $3.7 million by Christmas. Kenny adjourned Monday’s hearing until January.

Until then, the Wayne County Commission is expected to hear a request from the sheriff’s office asking that about $1 million be transferred from the sheriff’s office’s general salary budget to the office’s overtime budget while the court hearing plays out.

Sheriff’s office employees Monday detailed issues brought on by the jail population during testimony, including:

■ Housing inmates in supposedly closed areas of the system’s three jail buildings.

■ Forcing jailers to work more than 56 hours a week, the maximum under the collective-bargaining agreement.

■ Locking down inmates for longer-than-normal periods.

The sheriff’s office also tried to get a memorandum of agreement with the unions to allow deputies not normally assigned to jail duty to work jail overtime. That request was declined.

“I think it can be empirically proven that the jails have been underfunded,” Pfannes said during testimony.

It’s a scenario that’s played out year after year. In 2011-12, the sheriff’s office was allotted $2.6 million for overtime, but ended up spending about $11.5 million. For the 2012-13 fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, the sheriff’s office was allotted $3.3 million but spent $17 million on overtime.

“You can only work so many hours and still be expected to be on your A-game,” Pfannes said.

He said to overcompensate from shortages in staffing, jails sometime have gone from dayside staffing levels, where five deputies are on each floor, to nighttime staffing, which has just three deputies on the floor. That means inmates are left in their cells for longer periods because there are not enough deputies to allow them out.

Commissioner Kevin McNamara said more attention needs to be paid to the sheriff’s office’s mandated functions.

“There is still a lot he can do to bring down the cost of that jail system,” he said. “We don’t need to fund road patrols. We need to get down to our core job of jailing people.”